Part 1 The Emerging Tender Bud
I believe that one has to be willing to invest time and interaction with another in order to truly know them to any degree. I also believe that it will be some who claim to know and to follow our Lord and yet fail to make the investment who will come to the horrific realization of their ultimate failure too late one day soon.
Jesus' words in Matthew 7:22-23 (NLT):
22 On judgment day many will tell me, 'Lord, Lord, we prophesied in your name and cast out demons in your name and performed many miracles in your name.' 23"But I will reply, I never knew you.Go away. The things you did were not authorized."
The awesome power of His name is one thing - truthfully incontestable in the universe, the intimate and knowing relationship with the Lord Himself is yet another ...
To truly understand another person and to begin to recognize what it is that inspires them in any event can require a great deal of investment. Truly understanding some things that our Lord allows in our lives absolutely requires this investment. One advantage we have in relationship with Him, as opposed to some of the others in our lives, is that we have His written word. He doesn't hide who He is from us. Instead He's told us plainly who He is and gives us examples of His character throughout the whole of it. It's one of His many relational gifts to us. Among the keys to enacting its living power in our lives is our willingness to first make the investment to study it. But without the the additional willingness to make the effort to know and interact with Him intimately, one risks the possibility of being deceived and ultimately turned away on the day when called to account.
Simple faith led me to a relationship with my Lord as a young boy, though at the time I couldn't begin to grasp in any way everything that would come to me from it. What I knew of Him then was very little and it was untested in my own life. My motivation was simple, self serving and rooted in fear. I had heard that there were two possible destinations for a soul leaving this world - one being the eternal glory of Heaven and the other the unspeakable horrors and damnation in Hell. With child like faith, my young mind believed what I had heard and the choice really wasn't hard for me to make - this Jesus, the Son Of God could save me.
As I grew and learned more by His grace, I came to label the teaching that I perceived earlier and throughout much of my youth as "Hell and Damnation Teaching". Through it I learned to have such fear of the God who had the power to send me to eternal torture that fear alone became the primary basis of my relationship with Him. Mine was a limited and tortured understanding that would have ruled the remainder of my days in misery and fear had it not been for the fact that the Sovereign Lord participates intimately in the relationships He seeks out with those who are willing to respond - even with such lowly and unworthy creatures as myself.
In all fairness, I know there was other teaching back then, and I don't hold anyone else accountable for my understanding. But this incredibly limited and threatening perception of Him stuck with me and I couldn't have known how upside down, inside out and backward my understanding of Him was. It was what I knew of Him at the time and it set me up for a series of one on one interactions with an incredibly patient and loving God to show me that there was much more to the truth.
If one understands how I at that time viewed the God who righteously rules over all that exists and couples it with the tendency of human flesh to fail, they might begin to understand my misery back then. My simple faith was solid - I had no desire to risk questioning the truth that God did in fact exist or that He was sovereign over all of creation ... including me. So my missteps in life cast against the backdrop of my limited understanding of Him kept me in fearful torture. I respected Him and I feared Him, which to a proper and holy degree is right - but I was deathly afraid of Him. My perception of Him then was one of wrath, not in any way one of love or caring.
A partial truth is so dangerous and so deceptive. It skews understanding to allow belief in a lie and leads many worldly and unwitting to terminal condemnation. It's a common weapon of my enemy and one that he uses unsparingly against those who fail to seek out the fullness of what is real - what truly exists in the sight of The One who sees everything ...
I believe that one has to be willing to invest time and interaction with another in order to truly know them to any degree. I also believe that it will be some who claim to know and to follow our Lord and yet fail to make the investment who will come to the horrific realization of their ultimate failure too late one day soon.
Jesus' words in Matthew 7:22-23 (NLT):
22 On judgment day many will tell me, 'Lord, Lord, we prophesied in your name and cast out demons in your name and performed many miracles in your name.' 23"But I will reply, I never knew you.Go away. The things you did were not authorized."
The awesome power of His name is one thing - truthfully incontestable in the universe, the intimate and knowing relationship with the Lord Himself is yet another ...
To truly understand another person and to begin to recognize what it is that inspires them in any event can require a great deal of investment. Truly understanding some things that our Lord allows in our lives absolutely requires this investment. One advantage we have in relationship with Him, as opposed to some of the others in our lives, is that we have His written word. He doesn't hide who He is from us. Instead He's told us plainly who He is and gives us examples of His character throughout the whole of it. It's one of His many relational gifts to us. Among the keys to enacting its living power in our lives is our willingness to first make the investment to study it. But without the the additional willingness to make the effort to know and interact with Him intimately, one risks the possibility of being deceived and ultimately turned away on the day when called to account.
Simple faith led me to a relationship with my Lord as a young boy, though at the time I couldn't begin to grasp in any way everything that would come to me from it. What I knew of Him then was very little and it was untested in my own life. My motivation was simple, self serving and rooted in fear. I had heard that there were two possible destinations for a soul leaving this world - one being the eternal glory of Heaven and the other the unspeakable horrors and damnation in Hell. With child like faith, my young mind believed what I had heard and the choice really wasn't hard for me to make - this Jesus, the Son Of God could save me.
As I grew and learned more by His grace, I came to label the teaching that I perceived earlier and throughout much of my youth as "Hell and Damnation Teaching". Through it I learned to have such fear of the God who had the power to send me to eternal torture that fear alone became the primary basis of my relationship with Him. Mine was a limited and tortured understanding that would have ruled the remainder of my days in misery and fear had it not been for the fact that the Sovereign Lord participates intimately in the relationships He seeks out with those who are willing to respond - even with such lowly and unworthy creatures as myself.
In all fairness, I know there was other teaching back then, and I don't hold anyone else accountable for my understanding. But this incredibly limited and threatening perception of Him stuck with me and I couldn't have known how upside down, inside out and backward my understanding of Him was. It was what I knew of Him at the time and it set me up for a series of one on one interactions with an incredibly patient and loving God to show me that there was much more to the truth.
If one understands how I at that time viewed the God who righteously rules over all that exists and couples it with the tendency of human flesh to fail, they might begin to understand my misery back then. My simple faith was solid - I had no desire to risk questioning the truth that God did in fact exist or that He was sovereign over all of creation ... including me. So my missteps in life cast against the backdrop of my limited understanding of Him kept me in fearful torture. I respected Him and I feared Him, which to a proper and holy degree is right - but I was deathly afraid of Him. My perception of Him then was one of wrath, not in any way one of love or caring.
A partial truth is so dangerous and so deceptive. It skews understanding to allow belief in a lie and leads many worldly and unwitting to terminal condemnation. It's a common weapon of my enemy and one that he uses unsparingly against those who fail to seek out the fullness of what is real - what truly exists in the sight of The One who sees everything ...
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